Tuesday, March 24, 2009

April 2, London: The U.S. Officially Submits to Chinese Dominance

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 3/24/09

The first misstep was when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner made the traditional attempt to establish dominance over China’s more than one billion by saying that President Obama believed that China was devaluing its currency. Didn’t work that well and had even an ironic aspect given the financial disasters which occurred under Geithner’s watch in New York.

Next, China responds in a London meeting by saying it is worried about its investments in U.S. Treasuries. China, for the first time, initiates a territorial imperative into the discussion by lecturing, putting itself in the dominant position of teacher and the U.S. in the submissive position of the irresponsible pupil.

Then China masterfully plays the Tibet card. It openly attacks and arrests Buddhist monks on the 50th year anniversary of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Two weeks prior, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton virtually gave them permission to do so. In that historic moment, the United States officially submitted to Chinese dominance.

South Africa came as a surprise. The frosting on the cake for China. South African officials announced yesterday that His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a winner of the Noble Prize for Peace, will not be allowed to speak at a peace conference in Johannesburg. Officials there say South Africa doesn’t want to offend its new Chinese friends.

Wow. And we thought South Africa was our own sub-state. The Clinton people and the Nantucket liberals like Gordon Brown even see it as their model for globalization. We thought we had that one in our pocket with a black President.

These last few days the Chinese have been conspicuously and openly prancing around a young middle-range government employee that they have dressed up to look like the Panchen Lama, the second most important monk in Tibet, to praise the way of the Chinese and the backwardness of Tibetans. The real Panchen Lama has long disappeared. He was kidnapped as a child and has not been heard from in years. This open display of the phony Panchen Lama illustrates a new confidence in China’s feelings of economic dominance. By the way, if the Chinese do not want the real Panchen Lama they can send him to our house.

But April 2 is the big day. On April 2, the G-20 will meet at a long awaited meeting in London in which, as The Wall Street Journal reports, China will call for the creation of a new currency to eventually replace the dollar as the world's standard, proposing a sweeping overhaul of global finance that reflects developing nations' growing unhappiness with the U.S. role in the world economy.

“The unusual proposal,” reports the Journal, “made by central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan in an essay released Monday in Beijing, is part of China's increasingly assertive approach to shaping the global response to the financial crisis.”

To understand China’s strategy is to understand the cultural tradition of yielding power which goes back 6,000 years to the Wu Priesthood. Over the millennia it has brought forth Lao Tsu and Sun Tzu. Vietnam’s General Giap said he used it to beat the Americans in Vietnam. It is an intuition-based philosophy which is diametrically opposed to the casually hide bound Protestant Ethic. It relies on waiting; waiting for as long as it takes – decades, centuries, millennia, if necessary.

The Wu Priesthood tradition says opportunity comes with an opponent’s weakness and weakness in one region indicates pending breakage in the whole.

The Chinese sensed pending breakage in the American Consensus when the Thai baht broke its climb back in the late 1990s. They sensed breakage when we changed the dollar from a perfect balance of circles and squares to the bloated big-head thing all a kilter put together in the Clinton administration. They sensed it when we started running former Presidents’ relatives for President like they do in Argentina, and using them for Secretary of State instead of professionals. They sensed it in the 2008 election when America was offered two candidates; one who wanted to go to war with Russia and another, sprung from Oprah’s couch, who knew nothing about economy, management or governance and in fact had never had a real job, but had a terrific, flashing smile and oratory gifts which rang like Caruso.

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Profile

Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning magazine writer and has worked more than 30 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and book, movie, music and art reviewer. His essays on politics and world affairs have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and magazines. He has published poetry in Painted Bride Quarterly and has written dozens of magazine articles. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He has written hundreds of columns for "Pundits Blog" in "The Hill" a political journal in Washington, D.C. He lives in the White Mountains with his wife and four children.